RESEARCH

Summary

My work covers the cultural, social, and policy implications of emerging technologies, primarily social media and artificial intelligence. I’m interested in how these technologies make large audiences available to individuals, automate persuasion and deception at scale, and reshape identity, knowledge production, and trust. My current research centers on AI-enabled fraud and scams — how generative AI is changing the scale, sophistication, and regulation of financial deception — as part of my role directing Data & Society’s AI & Democracy program. I’m also finishing a book project investigating how people come to believe far-right, fringe, and conspiratorial (dis)information they encounter online (what we usually call far-right online radicalization), tentatively titled Down the Rabbit Hole.

I am a qualitative social scientist in Communication and Media Studies, located primarily in the subfield of Internet Studies. My methods include ethnography, interviews, focus groups, content and discourse analysis, and cultural studies. I like multimethodological work and enjoy working with critical, interpretive, qualitative, and quantitative scholars.

If you’ve never read any of my work, my most-cited paper (by far) is “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter users, context collapse, and the imagined audience,” written with danah boyd based on research I did as a PhD intern at Microsoft Research in 2009; it is the first scholarly piece on what danah calls “context collapse.” Here’s the PDF.

My current research areas are:

For a complete listing of my work with links to PDFs of articles (including work on a bunch of other stuff) please see my Publications page.

Please note that full drafts of papers in review or being workshopped are not linked here as they may change substantively before publication. Please email me for a copy of the current draft. 

ARTIFICIAL INTELLIGENCE AND DEMOCRACY

I am interested, broadly, in how information systems, automation, and AI contribute to tensions between democratic theory and practice. My work explores how technology impacts the knowledge and institutions that are essential to functional democracy, including journalism, academia, scientific inquiry, and government itself.

Currently, I focus on how generative AI is transforming fraud, scams, and other forms of AI-enabled financial harm. This work asks how automated persuasion changes the scale and targeting of deception, what regulatory frameworks exist (and don’t) to address AI-driven fraud globally, and how platforms, regulators, and researchers should respond. Otherwise, I am interested in how AI is changing knowledge production and how AI might best be governed by regulators.

I study a range of fringe and far-right extremist subcultures, such as white and male supremacist groups, QAnon, and conspiracy theorists, and examine how they use social media to create alternative forms of knowledge, spread propaganda, manipulate mainstream media, and conduct systemic harassment. Given that most social media technologies were based on idealistic visions of human interaction, they are easily exploited by bad actors. Institutions like journalism and academia have been slow to adapt, and their adherence to practices developed in the age of broadcast media has, for the most part, allowed them to be exploited very efficiently and ruthlessly by extremist groups. For instance, the emphasis on “free speech” on platforms like Reddit and Twitter has made them rife with hateful speech and harassment, while the mainstream media’s desire to show “both sides of the story” has allowed white supremacist and misogynist points of view to be positioned as equally valid as anti-racist and feminist perspectives.

My CITAP colleagues and I developed an approach that we call “Critical Disinformation Studies” that centers history, politics, and power when considering disinformation. We believe that disinformation is not new, is not caused by social platforms, and is linked with much longer histories of systemic falsehoods that underpin systems of inequality (such as anti-Blackness or misogyny). I highly recommend my essay with Rachel Kuo for an overview of this approach.

Critical Disinformation Studies

The Far-Right and Conspiracy Theories

HARASSMENT

I’ve also written extensively on online harassment as a networked, coordinated phenomenon rather than a matter of individual bad actors. My model of Morally Motivated Networked Harassment (MMNH) describes how an “amplifier” — a highly-followed account — signals that someone has violated a moral or social norm, triggering their network to pile on; I’ve traced this dynamic through gendered harassment campaigns, the manosphere, and response-video culture on YouTube. I also work on the flip side of this problem — protecting researchers who study harassment, extremism, and other controversial topics from becoming targets themselves. I co-authored Data & Society’s 2016 guide for academics on conducting “risky research” safely, and in 2025 I led the Association of Internet Researchers’ Risky Research Working Group in producing a full guide to researcher protection and safety.

Male supremacist movements and gendered harassment:

  • Marwick, A. & Caplan, R. (2018). “Drinking Male Tears: Language, the Manosphere, and Networked Harassment.” Feminist Media Studies 18(4): 543-559. [Link] [PDF]
  • Marwick, A. (2017). “Scandal or Sex Crime? Gendered Privacy and the Celebrity Nude Photo Leaks.” Ethics and Information Technology, 19(3), 177-191. [Link] [PDF]

Networked harassment:

ONLINE PRIVACY AND SURVEILLANCE

​My motivation in researching online privacy is to interrogate victim-blaming discourses that maintain that privacy violations are the fault of the victim, whether for putting “too much” information online or not protecting themselves appropriately. My theory of networked privacy argues instead that privacy violations are an inevitable consequence of the social connections social media makes possible, the technical affordances of platforms, and large-scale data-mining and surveillance. These violations are consistently hardest on people who are already marginalized in other areas of their lives, which is why I treat privacy as a social justice issue. This area of my work is most concerned with the implications of race, gender, sexuality, and socioeconomic status, all explored at length in my 2023 book, The Private is Political.

Central to the book is the concept of “privacy work”: drawing on interviews and focus groups with a diverse group of Americans, I show that even heavy social media users care deeply about privacy and engage in extensive, ongoing work to protect it — they are not simply careless or unconcerned. But individual privacy work can’t keep pace with what I call the “violation machine” of the modern internet, which is why I argue safeguarding privacy has to happen at the collective level, not just through individual vigilance.

Other work interrogates the privacy paradox, which basically asks why people claim to care about their privacy while posting personal data online. I find this line of questioning quite frustrating. Information provision online is not and should not be a proxy of privacy concern. This ignores the vast social benefits that participating online provides, and it ignores the fact that people delineate between information like health data, credit card numbers, nude photos etc. and social information (pictures, birthday, likes and dislikes). I am also interested in the privacy calculus literature, which maintains that people make a cost-benefit decision when providing information. My two papers with Eszter Hargittai suggests that people think privacy violations are inevitable, and instead do what they can to mitigate their impact.​

Privacy and Marginalized Individuals

  • Marwick, A. (2023). The Private is Political: Networked Privacy in Social Media. New Haven: Yale University Press. 
  • Danah boyd and I edited a special issue of the International Journal of Communication called “Privacy at the Margins” which collects a number of papers examining privacy attitudes and practices among understudied groups.
  • We also wrote a review essay which you can read here.
  • Pitcan, M., Marwick, A. & boyd, d. (2018). “Performing the Vanilla Self: Respectability Politics, Social Class, and the Digital World.” Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication.   [Open Access Link]
  • Marwick, A., Fontaine, C. & boyd, d. (2017). “‘Nobody sees it, nobody gets mad’: Social Media, Privacy, and Personal Responsibility among Low-SES Youth.” Social Media & Society, May 30.  [Open Access Link]
  • Marwick, A. (2017). “Scandal or Sex Crime? Gendered Privacy and the Celebrity Nude Photo Leaks.” Ethics and Information Technology, 19(3), 177-191. [LINK] [PDF]
  • Gilman, M., Madden, M., Levy, K & Marwick, A. (2017). “Privacy, Poverty and Big Data: A Matrix of Vulnerabilities for Poor Americans.” Washington University Law Review 95(1): 53-125.  [Open Access Link]

Networked Privacy, Privacy Work, and the Privacy Paradox

Surveillance Studies

MICRO-CELEBRITY 

I no longer work very much on online celebrity, the practice of micro-celebrity, or consumer culture, but I am extremely flattered that my earlier work on the subject still has significant uptake. However, if you want to interview someone about TikTok influencers, or need an outside reader for your dissertation on [awesome related topic], I am no longer your gal– there are a plethora of talented academics working on these issues who keep up with the field more than I do. Might I refer you to the Content Creator Studies Network?

My primary lens through which to examine online celebrity is as a practice that requires emotional labor and self-censorship. If you want to read my thoughts on this, the best source is Chapter 3 of Status Update (“the Fabulous Lives of Micro-celebrities”), where I talk extensively about micro-celebrity practice and provide multiple case studies from Silicon Valley during the Web 2.0 era.

  • Marwick, A. (2019). “The Algorithmic Celebrity: The Future of Internet Fame and Microcelebrity Studies.” In Abidin, C. and Brown, M.L. (eds), Microcelebrity around the Globe: Approaches to Cultures of Internet Fame. Bingley UK: Emerald Group Publishing, pp.161-169. [Scanned Book Chapter PDF]
  • Marwick, A. (2015). “Instafame: Luxury Selfies in the Attention Economy.” Public Culture 27(1): 137-160. [Link] [Pre-Print PDF]
  • Marwick, A (2015). “You May Know Me from YouTube: (Micro)-Celebrity in Social Media.” In Marshall, D. & Redmond, S. (eds), A Companion to Celebrity. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell, 333-350. [Pre-Print PDF]
  • Marwick, A. and boyd, d. (2011). “To See and Be Seen: Celebrity Practice on Twitter.” Convergence 17(2): 139 – 158.  [Link] [PDF]
  • Marwick, A. and boyd, d. (2011). “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media and Society 13(1): 114-133.  [Link] [PDF]